Langston Hughes

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• Born: 1 February 1902
• Birthplace: Joplin, Missouri
• Died: 22 May 1967 (post-surgical heart failure)
• Best Known As: Author of The Weary Blues (1926)

Langston Hughes published more than three dozen books during his life, starting out with poetry and then expanding into novels, short stories, and plays. He is closely associated with the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of African-American literature and music in New York City following World War One, but he wrote poetry, books, and newspaper columns right through into the 1960s. Hughes's work often spoke plainly about the lives of ordinary black people, which in later years earned him a reputation as one of the major black voices of the 1900s. His works include the poetry volumes The Weary Blues (1926) and Shakespeare in Harlem (1942), the novel Not Without Laughter (1930), and the short story collection The Ways of White Folks (1934). He wrote two personal memoirs: The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder as I Wander (1956).

Hughes, Langston (1902–1967), poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, autobiographer, and writer of children's books. Born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, Langston Hughes grew up mainly in Lawrence, Kansas, but also lived in Illinois, Ohio, and Mexico.

By the time Hughes enrolled at Columbia University in New York, he had already launched his literary career with his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in the Crisis, edited by W. E. B.Du Bois. He had also committed himself both to writing and to writing mainly about African Americans.

Hughes's sense of dedication was instilled in him most of all by his maternal grandmother, Mary Langston, whose first husband had died at Harpers Ferry as a member of John Brown's band, and whose second husband (Hughes's grandfather) had also been a militant abolitionist. Another important family figure was John Mercer Langston, a brother of Hughes's grandfather who was one of the best-known black Americans of the nineteenth century. At the same time, Hughes struggled with a sense of desolation fostered by parental neglect. He himself recalled being driven early by his loneliness “to books, and the wonderful world in books.”

Leaving Columbia in 1922, Hughes spent the next three years in a succession of menial jobs. But he also traveled abroad. He worked on a freighter down the west coast of Africa and lived for several months in Paris before returning to the United States late in 1924. By this time, he was well known in African American literary circles as a gifted young poet.

His major early influences were Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, as well as the black poets Paul Laurence Dunbar, a master of both dialect and standard verse, and Claude McKay, a radical socialist who also wrote accomplished lyric poetry. However, Sandburg, who Hughes later called “my guiding star,” was decisive in leading him toward free verse and a radically democratic modernist aesthetic.

His devotion to black music led him to novel fusions of jazz and blues with traditional verse in his first two books, The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). His emphasis on lower-class black life, especially in the latter, led to harsh attacks on him in the black press. With these books, however, he established himself as a major force of the Harlem Renaissance. In 1926, in the Nation, he provided the movement with a manifesto when he skillfully argued the need for both race pride and artistic independence in his most memorable essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.”

By this time, Hughes had enrolled at the historically black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, from which he would graduate in 1929. In 1927 he began one of the most important relationships of his life, with his patron Mrs Charlotte Mason, or “Godmother,” who generously supported him for two years. She supervised the writing of his first novel, Not Without Laughter (1930), about a sensitive, black midwestern boy and his struggling family. However, their relationship collapsed about the time the novel appeared, and Hughes sank into a period of intense personal unhappiness and disillusionment.

One result was his firm turn to the far left in politics. During a year (1932–1933) spent in the Soviet Union, he wrote his most radical verse. A year in Carmel, California, led to a collection of short stories, The Ways of White Folks (1934). This volume is marked by pessimism about race relations, as well as a sardonic realism.

After his play Mulatto, on the twinned themes of miscegenation and parental rejection, opened on Broadway in 1935, Hughes wrote other plays, including comedies such as Little Ham (1936) and a historical drama, Emperor of Haiti (1936). Most of these plays were only moderate successes. In 1937 he spent several months in Europe, including a long stay in besieged Madrid. In 1938 he returned home to found the Harlem Suitcase Theater, which staged his agitprop drama Don’t You Want to Be Free? The play, employing several of his poems, vigorously blended black nationalism, the blues, and socialist exhortation. The same year, a socialist organization published a pamphlet of his radical verse, “A New Song.”

With World War II, Hughes moved more to the center politically. His first volume of autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), written in an episodic, lightly comic manner, made virtually no mention of his leftist sympathies. In his book of verse Shakespeare in Harlem (1942) he once again sang the blues. On the other hand, this collection, as well as another, his Jim Crow's Last Stand (1943), strongly attacked racial segregation.

Perhaps his finest literary achievement during the war came in the course of writing a weekly column in the Chicago Defender that began in 1942 and lasted twenty years. The highlight of the column was an offbeat Harlem character called Jesse B. Semple, or Simple, and his exchanges with a staid narrator in a neighborhood bar, where Simple commented on a variety of matters but mainly about race and racism. Simple became Hughes's most celebrated and beloved fictional creation, and the subject of five collections edited by Hughes, starting in 1950 with Simple Speaks His Mind.

After the war, two books of verse, Fields of Wonder (1947) and One-Way Ticket (1949), added little to his fame. However, in Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) he broke new ground with verse accented by the discordant nature of the new bebop jazz that reflected a growing desperation in the black urban communities of the North. At the same time, Hughes's career was vexed by constant harassment by right-wing forces about his ties to the Left. In vain he protested that he had never been a Communist and had severed all such links. In 1953 he suffered a public humiliation at the hands of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who forced him to appear in Washington, D.C., and testify officially about his politics. Hughes denied that he had ever been a party member but conceded that some of his radical verse had been ill-advised.

Hughes's career hardly suffered from this episode. Within a short time McCarthy himself was discredited and Hughes was free to write at length about his year in the Soviet Union in I Wonder as I Wander (1956), his much-admired second volume of autobiography. He became prosperous, although he always had to work hard for his measure of prosperity and sometimes called himself, with good cause, a “literary sharecropper.”

In the 1950s he constantly looked to the musical stage for success, as he sought to repeat his major coup of the 1940s, when Kurt Weill and Elmer Rice had chosen him as the lyricist for their Street Scene (1947). This production was hailed as a breakthrough in the development of American opera; for Hughes, the apparently endless cycle of poverty into which he had been locked came to an end. He bought a home in Harlem.

The Simple books inspired a musical show, Simply Heavenly (1957), that met with some success. However, Hughes's Tambourines to Glory (1963), a gospel musical play satirizing corruption in a black storefront church, failed badly, with some critics accusing him of creating caricatures of black life. Nevertheless, his love of gospel music led to other acclaimed stage efforts, usually mixing words, music, and dance in an atmosphere of improvisation. Notable here were the Christmas show Black Nativity (1961) and, inspired by the civil rights movement, Jericho–Jim Crow (1964).

For Hughes, writing for children was important. Starting with the successful Popo and Fifina (1932), a tale set in Haiti and written with Arna Bontemps, he eventually published a dozen children's books, on subjects such as jazz, Africa, and the West Indies. Proud of his versatility, he also wrote a commissioned history of the NAACP and the text of a much praised pictorial history of black America. His text in The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), where he explicated photographs of Harlem by Roy DeCarava, was judged masterful by reviewers, and confirmed Hughes's reputation for an unrivaled command of the nuances of black urban culture.

The 1960s saw Hughes as productive as ever. In 1962 his ambitious booklength poem Ask Your Mama, dense with allusions to black culture and music, appeared. However, the reviews were dismissive. Hughes's work was not as universally acclaimed as before in the black community. Although he was hailed in 1966 as a historic artistic figure at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, he also found himself increasingly rejected by young black militants at home as the civil rights movement lurched toward Black Power. His last book was the volume of verse, posthumously published, The Panther and the Lash (1967), mainly about civil rights. He died in May that year in New York City.

In many ways Hughes always remained loyal to the principles he had laid down for the younger black writers in 1926. His art was firmly rooted in race pride and race feeling even as he cherished his freedom as an artist. He was both nationalist and cosmopolitan. As a radical democrat, he believed that art should be accessible to as many people as possible. He could sometimes be bitter, but his art is generally suffused by a keen sense of the ideal and by a profound love of humanity, especially black Americans. He was perhaps the most original of African American poets and, in the breadth and variety of his work, assuredly the most representative of African American writers.

[See also Hurston, Zora Neale; Madam Alberta K. Johnson; Mule Bone.

Bibliography

• Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, 2 vols., 1986–1988.
• Langston Hughes, Collected Poems, 1994

Arnold Rampersad

For more information on James Mercer Langston Hughes, visit Britannica.com.

American author Langston Hughes (1902-1967), a moving spirit in the artistic ferment of the 1920s often called the Harlem Renaissance, expressed the mind and spirit of most African Americans for nearly half a century.

Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Mo., on Feb. 1, 1902. His parents soon separated, and Hughes was reared mainly by his mother, his maternal grandmother, and a childless couple named Reed. He attended public schools in Kansas and Illinois, graduating from high school in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1920. His high school companions, most of whom were white, remembered him as a handsome "Indian-looking" youth whom everyone liked and respected for his quiet, natural ways and his abilities. He won an athletic letter in track and held offices in the student council and the American Civic Association. In his senior year he was chosen class poet and yearbook editor.

Hughes spent the next year in Mexico with his father, who tried to discourage him from writing. But Hughes's poetry and prose were beginning to appear in the Brownie's Book, a publication for children edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, and he was starting work on more ambitious material dealing with adult realities. The poem "A Negro Speaks of River," which marked this development, appeared in the Crisis in 1921.

Hughes returned to America and enrolled at Columbia University; meanwhile, the Crisis printed several more of his poems. Finding the atmosphere at Columbia uncongenial, Hughes left after a year. He did odd jobs in New York. In 1923 he signed on as steward on a freighter. His first voyage took him down the west coast of Africa; his second took him to Spain. In 1924 he spent 6 months in Paris. He was relatively happy, produced some prose, and experimented with what he called "racial rhythms" in poetry. Most of this verse appeared in African American publications, but Vanity Fair, a magazine popular among middle-and upper-class women, published three poems.

Later in 1924 Hughes went to live with his mother in Washington, D.C. He hoped to earn enough money to return to college, but work as a hotel busboy paid very little, and life in the nation's capital, where class distinctions among African Americans were quite rigid, made him unhappy. He wrote many poems. "The Weary Blues" won first prize in 1925 in a literary competition sponsored by Opportunity, a magazine published by the National Urban League. That summer one of his essays and another poem won prizes in the Crisis literary contest. Meanwhile, Hughes had come to the attention of Carl Van Vechten, a white novelist and critic, who arranged publication of Hughes's first volume of verse, The Weary Blues (1926).

This book projected Hughes's enduring themes, established his style, and suggested the wide range of his poetic talent. It showed him committed to racial themes - pride in blackness and in his African heritage, the tragic mulatto, the everyday life of African Americans - and democracy and patriotism. Hughes transformed the bitterness which such themes generated in many of his African American contemporaries into sharp irony, gentle satire, and humor. His casual-seeming, folklike style, reflecting the simplicity and the earthy sincerity of his people, was strengthened in his second book, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927).

Hughes had resumed his education in 1925 and graduated from Lincoln University in 1929. Not without Laughter (1930) was his first novel. The story deals with an African American boy, Sandy, caught between two worlds and two attitudes. The boy's hardworking, respectability-seeking mother provides a counterpoint to his high-spirited, easy-laughing, footloose father. The mother is oriented to the middle-class values of the white world; the father believes that fun and laughter are the only virtues worth pursuing. Though the boy's character is blurred, Hughes's attention to details that reveal African American culture in America gives the novel strength.

The relative commercial success of his novel inspired Hughes to try making his living as an author. In 1931 he made the first of what became annual lecture tours. He took a trip to Soviet Union the next year. Meanwhile, he turned out poems, essays, book reviews, song lyrics, plays, and short stories. He edited five anthologies of African American writing and collaborated with Arna Bontemps on another and on a book for children. He wrote some 20 plays, including Mulatto, Simply Heavenly, and Tambourines to Glory. He translated Federico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet, and Gabriela Mistral, the Latin American Nobel laureate poet, and wrote two long autobiographical works.

As a newspaper columnist, Hughes created "Simple," probably his most enduring character, brought his style to perfection, and solidified his reputation as the "most eloquent spokesman" for African Americans. The Simple sketches, collected in five volumes, are presented as conversations between an uneducated, African American city dweller, Jesse B. Semple (Simple), and an educated but less sensitive African American acquaintance. The sketches, which ran in the Chicago Defender for 25 years, are too varied in subject, too relevant to the universal human condition, and too remarkable in their display of Hughes's best writing for any quick summary. That Simple is a universal man, even though his language, habits, and personality are the result of his particular experiences as an African American man, is a measure of Hughes's genius.

Hughes received numerous fellowships, awards, and honorary degrees, including the Anisfield-Wolf Award (1953) for a book on improving race relations. He taught creative writing at two universities; had his plays produced on four continents; and made recordings of African American history, music commentary, and his own poetry. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. His work, some of which was translated into a dozen languages, earned him an international reputation unlike any other African American writer except Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. Forty-seven volumes bear Hughes's name. He died in New York City on May 22, 1967.

Further Reading

The chief sources of biographical data are Hughes's autobiographical The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (1956); Donald C. Dickinson, A Bio-Bibliography of Langston Hughes, 1902-1967 (1967); James A. Emanuel, Langston Hughes (1967); Milton Meltzer, Langston Hughes: A Biography (1968); and Charlemae H. Rollins, Black Troubadour: Langston Hughes (1970). Hughes gets extensive critical treatment in Saunders Redding, To Make a Poet Black (1939); Hugh M. Gloster, Negro Voices in American Fiction (1948); John Milton Charles Hughes, The Negro Novelist, 1940-1950 (1953); and Robert A. Boone, The Negro Novel in America (1958). Historical background is provided by Benjamin O. Brawley, The Negro in Literature and Art in the United States (1918); John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans (1947; 3d ed. 1967); and Vernon Loggins, The Negro Author: His Development in America to 1900 (1959).

novelist; poet; playwright

Personal Information

Born James Mercer Langston Hughes, February 1, 1902, in Joplin, MO; died of congestive heart failure, May 22, 1967, in New York City; son of James Nathaniel (a businessman, lawyer, and rancher) and Carrie Mercer Hughes (a teacher; maiden name, Langston).
Education: Attended Columbia University, 1921-22; Lincoln University, A.B., 1929.
Memberships: Authors Guild; Dramatists Guild; American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP); PEN; National Institute of Arts and Letters; Omega Psi Phi.

Career

Author of poetry, long and short fiction, plays, nonfiction, and autobiography. In early years, worked as assistant cook, launderer, busboy, and at other odd jobs; worked as seaman on voyages to Africa and Europe; lived at various times in Mexico, France, Italy, Spain, and the Soviet Union. Madrid correspondent for Baltimore Afro-American, 1937; visiting professor in creative writing, Atlanta University, 1947; poet-in-residence, Laboratory School, University of Chicago, 1949.

Life's Work

A pioneer of modern black literature, Langston Hughes devoted his lengthy and diverse writing career to revealing the attitudes, experiences, and language of everyday black Americans. Famous for such acclaimed poems as "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and "Harlem," Hughes was also the author of the much-admired Jesse B. Semple stories, as well as plays, song lyrics, children's books, essays, a novel, and two autobiographies. Dubbed the "Negro Poet Laureate" and the "Poet Laureate of Harlem," he focused on the lives of urban blacks and was especially known for his sardonic and witty depictions of racism in the United States. Hughes rose to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and was one of the first black writers to infuse his work with colloquial language as well as the structures and rhythms of blues and jazz music. Hughes's "greatest value," noted George E. Kent in Langston Hughes, "is in the range of notes that he was able to play regarding the souls and strivings of black folks.... His gift was also to catch the shifting tones of the times and to sense the continuity of old things among the new. Thus he always seems current with the newer forces that arise with each decade."

While Hughes is regarded as one of the most influential of modern black writers, his work has been disparaged--by black and white critics alike--as lacking in depth and for depicting themes and characters considered low-brow. In his famous essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," published in the Nation in 1926, Hughes stated that his poetry was concerned with the commonfolk, the people who inhabited Chicago's South State Street or Harlem's Lennox Avenue, "people who have their hip of gin on Saturday nights and are not too important to themselves or the community, or too well fed, or too learned to watch the lazy world go round." Hughes related his art to an intense pride and delight in his race: "We younger Negroes who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear of shame.... We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves."

The circumstances of Hughes's life profoundly influenced his career as a writer. As Christopher Hitchens wrote in the Observer, "Not only was he born black in the era of Jim Crow, but he was born to a family that was extremely conscious of its responsibilities to 'The Race.'" Hughes was descended from a prominent black family that included his grandmother's first husband, Charles Howard Langston, who was killed in John Brown's 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, and Hughes's great uncle John Mercer Langston, a noted abolitionist who became the first black to serve in the U.S. Congress. His grandmother Mary Langston, who in 1910 was honored by President Theodore Roosevelt as the last surviving widow of the Harpers Ferry insurgents, regularly told the young Langston accounts of his family history, giving her grandson many early examples of their resilience and determination. As Hughes recounted in his autobiography The Big Sea, "Through my grandmother's stories always life moved, moved heroically toward an end. Nobody cried in my grandmother's stories. They worked, or schemed, or fought.... Something about my grandmother's stories (without her ever having said so) taught me the uselessness of crying about anything."

Hughes's early life was equally influenced, however, by disruption and restlessness. His father, James Hughes, who studied as a lawyer but was denied permission to an all-white examining board in Oklahoma, left his family and the United States to settle eventually in Mexico, where he became a wealthy businessman. Hughes's parents divorced soon thereafter, and his mother, Carrie, traveled from city to city in search of better-paying work. As a result, Hughes was raised mainly by his grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas, yet variously lived with or visited his mother in Kansas City, Topeka, Colorado Springs, Mexico, and other locations. For two years after his grandmother's death in 1912, he lived with a family in Lawrence named the Reeds, who introduced him to black spirituals. In 1914 his mother remarried and settled in Lincoln, Illinois; Hughes joined her and attended grammar school there.

In 1916, Hughes followed his mother and stepfather to Cleveland, Ohio, where he attended high school, some of the time living on his own in a rooming house. His high school was attended by many recent European immigrants, whom Hughes found to be much friendlier than more established American whites. Through his schoolmates and their families, many of whom were sympathetic to the socialist cause, Hughes was introduced to leftist literature and ideology. He became an active reader and was especially influenced by The Souls of Black Folk, a classic book on racism by W. E. B. Du Bois. Encouraged by a favorite English teacher, Hughes also began studying the works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, Friedrich Nietzsche, Theodore Dreiser, and other writers. He emulated Dunbar's dialect poems as well as Sandburg's free verse, and published poems in his school's literary magazine.

In 1920 Hughes visited his father in Mexico, coming face-to-face for the first time with the intense racism of his father, who considered blacks, Indians, and Mexicans as inferior people. Furthermore, his father insisted that Langston would amount to something worthwhile only if he abandoned his dreams of becoming a writer and pursued a practical occupation, such as bookkeeping. Frustrated and depressed, Hughes estranged himself from his father--a rift that was never mended. On the return trip, as Hughes rode a train over the Mississippi River, he began to jot down the lines that would become his most famous poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." In the poem, Hughes relates the struggle of black people to the history of rivers--from the Nile and the raising of the pyramids to the slave trade conducted down the mighty Mississippi. "I've known rivers:/ Ancient, dusky rivers," the poem states, "My soul has grown deep like the rivers." The poem was published in W. E. B. Du Bois's influential black magazine the Crisis and gained the seventeen-year-old Hughes recognition as a gifted, lyrical poet.

In the early 1920s Hughes devoted more and more time to his writing, and began what would become a lifelong fascination with travel. After teaching English for a year in Mexico, he moved to New York City and enrolled in Columbia University. There he spent as much time as possible among Harlem's flourishing literary and musical circles and supported himself through a series of odd jobs that included work as a clerk, busboy, flower salesman, and deck hand. After dropping out of Columbia in 1922, he traveled to West Africa aboard a merchant freighter and, as he would later recount in his autobiography The Big Sea, tossed his most precious books into the ocean as an act of releasing himself from his past. Later the same year he traveled to the Netherlands; on a second trip to Europe in 1924, he decided to live in Paris. There Hughes continued to write poems and fiction and became well-versed in the music of many blues and jazz artists who had become famous overseas. During this period, a number of his poems were published in a special Harlem issue of Survey Graphic magazine.

The following year, Hughes returned to the United States to help support his mother, who was living in Washington, D.C. His writing during this period demonstrated the influence of spirituals and the blues. Hughes made numerous trips to Harlem, where he became acquainted with such prominent literary figures as Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Arna Bontemps. His career gained an unexpected boost in 1925 while he was working as a busboy at a Washington hotel. Dining at the hotel was the poet Vachel Lindsay, to whom Hughes discreetly gave three of his poems. Lindsay, impressed with the poems, announced that he had discovered the "Negro Busboy Poet," and the following day Hughes received nationwide publicity. Hughes went on to write many poems in 1925 and 1926, eventually receiving the Amy Spingarn poetry award from the Crisis. During this time, he also enrolled at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he would earn his bachelor's degree in 1929. His first book of poems, The Weary Blues, was published by Alfred Knopf in 1926, and while some critics derided Hughes as lacking sophistication, others praised him as a true spokesman for the common people. Reviewer Du Bose Heyward of the New York Herald Tribune wrote that Hughes, "although only twenty-four years old, is already conspicuous in the group of Negro intellectuals who are dignifying Harlem with a genuine art life. Always intensely subjective, passionate, keenly sensitive to beauty and possessed of an unfaltering musical sense, Langston Hughes has given us a 'first book' that marks the opening of a career well worth watching."

During the rest of the 1920s, Hughes established himself as a writer in the black folk tradition. In 1926 he met folklorist Zora Neale Hurston and the next year accompanied her on a car trip through the South collecting black folklore. (Later the two collaborated on the play Mule Bone, which was not published or produced until 1991, due to a falling-out between the authors.) His second book of poems, Fine Clothes to the Jew, was published in 1927 and received mixed reviews, especially from black critics who felt that Hughes's concentration on the black lower classes ran contrary to the goal of racial integration.

In the spring of 1927, Hughes met a wealthy white woman, Charlotte Mason, who became his literary patron and provided him with a steady income while he worked on his first novel, Not without Laughter. Hughes eventually broke off his relationship with Mason as the two began to differ on the subject matter of his writing. Mason was unhappy with the tone of open protest in some of Hughes's poems, including "Advertisement for the Waldorf Astoria," which condemned the fact that blacks were allowed to work at the famous New York hotel but could not be admitted as guests.

During the 1930s, Hughes further established himself as a poet of the people. In 1931, at the urging of black educator Mary McLeod Bethune and with a $1000 grant from the Rosenwald Foundation, he began a reading tour of the American South. Hughes's speaking engagements were very popular, and his stature as a writer grew tremendously among black audiences. His concern with the common people and the plight of workers also took him to the Soviet Union, which he visited in 1932 as part of a 23-member black moviemaking group. The group eventually disbanded, and Hughes traveled alone in Central Asia, writing articles for Moscow newspapers. He later traveled to China, Korea, and Japan and was detained and questioned in Tokyo as a suspected Communist spy. During this period, Hughes published more radical and leftist verse, including The Dream Keeper and Other Poems and Scottsboro Limited.

Upon returning to the United States in 1933, Hughes was invited to live rent-free for a year at the cottage of Noel Sullivan in Carmel, California. He wrote prolifically, turning out at least one story or article every week. Many were sold to such periodicals as Scribner's, the New Yorker, and Harper's, and Hughes used most of the money to help support his ailing mother. Around the same time, he also completed a book of short stories entitled The Ways of White Folks, whose themes ranged from romantic tales set in Africa to satirical pieces that portrayed disillusionment with white literary patronage. After leaving California, Hughes traveled again to Mexico, where he earned a living tutoring and translating works from Spanish into English. In 1935 he received a Guggenheim fellowship, and later that year he collaborated with future Fisk University librarian and writer Arna Bontemps on a children's book. Two years later Hughes traveled to Spain and, together with Cuban protest poet Nicolas Guillen, was a correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American covering the Spanish Civil War. The following year he joined Theodore Dreiser as a U.S. representative at the International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture.

Also during the middle and late 1930s, Hughes began to see many of his plays produced, including Mulatto, which focuses on the conflict between a mulatto son and his white father. Mulatto ran on Broadway for over a year--a record at the time for a play by a black author--and initiated a prolific playwriting period for Hughes. From 1935 through the 1940s, Hughes wrote seven plays, as well as librettos for musicals that included Street Scene, which had a score by German composer Kurt Weill. Many of Hughes's plays were staged by the Gilpin Players in Cleveland, and Hughes founded three theater companies of his own: the Harlem Suitcase Theater in New York, the New Negro Theater in Los Angeles, and the Skyloft Players in Chicago.

During the 1940s Hughes was firmly established as a leading black poet, fiction writer, and playwright. In 1943 he began writing the short fiction for which he would become most famous, the "Simple" tales, which first began appearing in 1943 as a regular column in the Chicago Defender, a black-owned newspaper. Jesse B. Semple ("Simple") is a poor man who lives in Harlem, a kind of comic no-good, who tells his stories to the narrator, who serves as Simple's foil. Simple's tales of his troubles with work, women, money, and life in general often humorously reveal the problems of being a poor black man in a racist society. "White folks," Simple reasons, "is the cause of a lot of inconvenience in my life." The stories, which became very popular, were collected in the volumes Simple Speaks His Mind, Simple Takes a Wife, Simple Stakes a Claim, and The Best of Simple.

Hughes's other accomplishments during the 1940s included translating works by Nicolas Guillen and Haitian writer Jacques Romain (he had traveled to Haiti and Cuba as well), and coediting (with Bontemps) the influential anthology The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1949. He was honored with an American Academy of Arts and Letters grant and served as visiting professor at Atlanta University and as poet-in-residence at the University of Chicago. Hughes's poetry during this period, influenced by his return to Harlem in 1942, included Shakespeare in Harlem and Fields of Wonder, both of which explore the effects of the Great Depression on the lives of the residents of Harlem. Another book of poetry, One-Way Ticket, displays Hughes's growing criticism of the treatment of blacks in the United States following World War II.

The 1950s, according to James A. Emanuel in Langston Hughes, "excelled other decades in Hughes's career in the number and variety of books produced." In 1951 his first book-length poem, Montage of a Dream Deferred, was published; it portrays the deterioration of Harlem from the prosperity and cultural renaissance of the 1920s to the widespread poverty, drugs, and crime of the 1950s. While Hughes continued to publish plays, fiction, translations, and nonfiction in the 1950s, including a second autobiographical volume, I Wonder as I Wander, most of his writings concerned black history. The Sweet Flypaper of Life and A Pictorial History of the Negro in America were groundbreaking depictions of blacks in American history, from the arrival of slaves during the colonial period to the Montgomery bus boycott of the 1950s. Hughes also wrote a number of books on history and black biography for younger readers, including Famous Negro Heroes of America, which treated such historical figures as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. In addition, he coedited (with Bontemps) The Book of Negro Folklore, which is considered an important collection of black folk material. His varied accomplishments as a writer were reflected in the 1958 book A Langston Hughes Reader, which brought together selections of his fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.

During the 1960s Hughes's poetry reflected the racial turbulence of the times. Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz contained poems intended for musical accompaniment and offered biting scenarios for resolving racial segregation--such as a South where Martin Luther King, Jr., served as governor of Georgia and Orval Faubus, the Arkansas governor who defied federal orders to desegregate schools, was rendered a mammy in charge of a group of black children. These later poems are generally viewed as piercing variations on Hughes's career-long themes of humanism, acceptance, tolerance, and integration.

Hughes died of congestive heart failure in 1967. His last book of verse, The Panther and the Lash, was published posthumously. This work contains such protest poems as "Black Panther" and "The Backlash Blues," as well as poems that explore the independence of African countries.

Hughes is considered one of America's most enduring black authors. In Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing by American Negroes, David Littlejohn wrote that Hughes is "the one sure Negro classic, more certain of permanence than even [James] Baldwin or [Ralph] Ellison or [Richard] Wright.... By modeling his verse always on the sounds of Negro talk, the rhythms of Negro music, by retaining his own keen honesty and directness, his poetic sense and ironic intelligence, he maintained through four decades a readable newness distinctly his own."

Awards

First prize for poetry, Opportunity magazine, 1925; first prize for poetry, Witter Bynner undergraduate contests, Lincoln University, 1926; Amy Spingarn Award, Crisis; Intercollegiate Poetry Award, Palms magazine, 1927; Harmon Gold Medal for literature, 1931; Guggenheim fellowship, 1935; Rosenwald fellowship, 1941; Litt.D., Lincoln University, 1943; American Academy of Arts and Letters grant, 1947; Anisfield-Wolf Award, 1954; NAACP Spingarn Medal, 1960.

Works

Poetry

• The Weary Blues, Knopf, 1926.
• Fine Clothes to the Jew, Knopf, 1927.
• The Negro Mother and Other Dramatic Recitations, Golden Stair, 1931.
• Dear Lovely Death, Troutbeck, 1931.
• The Dream Keeper and Other Poems, Knopf, 1932.
• Scottsboro Limited, Golden Stair, 1932.
• (With Robert Glenn) Shakespeare in Harlem, Knopf, 1942.
• Jim Crow's Last Stand, Negro Publication Society of America, 1943.
• Freedom's Plow, Musette, 1943.
• Lament for Dark Peoples and Other Poems, Holland, 1944.
• Fields of Wonder, Knopf, 1947.
• One-Way Ticket, Knopf, 1949.
• Montage of a Dream Deferred, Holt, 1951.
• Selected Poems, Knopf, 1959.
• Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz, Knopf, 1961.
• The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times, Knopf, 1967.

Fiction

• Not without Laughter (novel), Knopf, 1930.
• The Ways of White Folks (stories), Knopf, 1934.
• Simple Speaks His Mind (stories), Simon and Schuster, 1950.
• Laughing to Keep from Crying (stories), Holt, 1952.
• Simple Takes a Wife (stories), Simon and Schuster, 1953.
• Simple Stakes a Claim (stories), Rinehart, 1957.
• Tambourines to Glory (novel), John Day, 1958.
• The Best of Simple (stories), Hill and Wang, 1961.
• Something in Common and Other Stories, Hill and Wang, 1963.
• Simple's Uncle Sam (stories), Hill and Wang, 1965.

Plays

• Mulatto, New York City, 1935.
• Little Ham, Cleveland, 1936.
• Soul Gone Home, Cleveland, 1937.
• Don't You Want to Be Free?, New York City, 1938.
• (Lyricist) Street Scene (book by Elmer Rice; music by Kurt Weill), New York City, 1947.
• Simply Heavenly, New York City, 1957.
• Black Nativity, New York City, 1961.
• Tambourines to Glory , New York City, 1963.
• Five Plays by Langston Hughes, Indiana University Press, 1963.
• The Prodigal Son, New York City, 1965.
• (With Zora Neale Hurston) Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life, written in 1930, first produced and published in 1991.

Nonfiction

• The Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia, Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR, 1934.
• The Big Sea: An Autobiography, Knopf, 1940.
• (Editor with Arna Bontemps) The Poetry of the Negro: 1746-1949, Doubleday, 1949.
• (With Roy De Carava) The Sweet Flypaper of Life, Simon and Schuster, 1955.
• (With Milton Meltzer) A Pictorial History of the Negro in America, Crown, 1956, 4th edition published as A Pictorial History of Black Americans, 1973.
• I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey, Rinehart, 1956.
• (Editor with Bontemps) The Book of Negro Folklore, Dodd, 1958.
• Fight for Freedom: The Story of the NAACP, Norton, 1962.
• (With Meltzer) Black Magic: A Pictorial History of the Negro in American Entertainment, Prentice-Hall, 1967.
• Black Misery, Paul S. Erickson, 1969.

Children's books

• The First Book of Negroes, F. Watts, 1952.
• The First Book of Rhythms, F. Watts, 1954.
• Famous American Negroes, Dodd, 1954.
• Famous Negro Music Makers, Dodd, 1955.
• The First Book of Jazz, F. Watts, 1955, revised edition, 1976.
• The First Book of the West Indies, F. Watts, 1956.
• Famous Negro Heroes of America, Dodd, 1958.
• The First Book of Africa, F. Watts, 1960, revised edition, 1964.

Further Reading

Books

• Berry, Faith, Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem, Citadel, 1992.
• Bloom, Harold, editor, Langston Hughes, Chelsea House, 1989.
• Bruck, Peter, editor, The Black American Short Story in the 20th Century: A Collection of Critical Essays, Grner Publishing Co., 1977.
• Davis, Arthur P., From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900-1960, Howard University Press, 1974.
• Dickinson, Donald C., A Bio-Bibliography of Langston Hughes, 1902-1967, Archon Books, 1967.
• Emanuel, James A., Langston Hughes, Twayne, 1967.
• Hughes, Langston, The Big Sea: An Autobiography, Knopf, 1940.
• Hughes, Langston, I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey, Rinehart, 1956.
• Littlejohn, David, Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing by American Negroes, Viking, 1966.
• Meltzer, Milton, Langston Hughes: A Biography, Crowell, 1968.
• O'Daniel, Therman B., editor, Langston Hughes: Black Genius--A Critical Evaluation, Morrow, 1971.
• Poetry Criticism, Volume 1, Gale, 1991.
• Rampersad, Arnold, The Life of Langston Hughes, Oxford University Press, Volume 1, 1902-1941: I, Too, Sing America, 1986, Volume 2, 1941-1967: I Dream a World, 1988.
• Short Story Criticism, Volume 6, Gale, 1990.

Periodicals

• Essence, February 1992.
• Mirabella, March 1991.
• Nation, June 23, 1926; July 3, 1967.
• Negro American Literature Forum, Winter 1971.
• New York Herald Tribune, August 1, 1926.
• Observer, January 18, 1987.
• Phylon, Spring 1954.
• Southwest Review, Winter 1969.

— Michael E. Mueller

(1902-1967), African-American poet, playwright, novelist, and journalist. Because his father immigrated to Mexico and his mother was often away, Hughes was reared in Lawrence, Kansas, by his grandmother Mary Langston, whose first husband had died at Harpers Ferry fighting under John Brown and whose second (Hughes's grandfather) had also been a fierce abolitionist. She helped inspire in Hughes a devotion to the cause of social justice.

A lonely child, he turned to reading and writing, publishing his first poems while in high school in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1921, after a failed reunion with his father, he entered Columbia University but left after an unhappy year. Even as he worked as a delivery man, a messman on ships to Africa and Europe, a busboy, and a dishwasher, his verse appeared regularly in such magazines as Crisis (naacp) and Opportunity (National Urban League). As a poet, Hughes was a pioneer in the fusion of traditional verse with black artistic forms, especially blues and jazz.

He was a leader in the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties and thirties, publishing two verse collections, The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), as well as a novel Not without Laughter (1930) and an embittered short-story collection The Ways of White Folks (1934). Mainly because of the depression and disillusionment with a wealthy patron, Hughes became a socialist in the 1930s. He never joined the Communist party, but he published radical verse and essays in magazines like New Masses and International Literature and spent a year (1932-1933) in the Soviet Union. Several of his plays also appeared in this decade, the most successful, Mulatto, a tragedy about miscegenation, reaching Broadway in 1935.

Around 1939, Hughes moved away from the political Left, as the apolitical tone of his autobiography The Big Sea (1940) suggests. During the war he supported the Allies with patriotic songs and sketches and published a verse collection, Shakespeare in Harlem (1942). He vigorously attacked segregation, especially in his column in the black weekly Chicago Defender, where he created a comic but incisive black urban Everyman, Jesse B. Semple, or "Simple." Simple's popularity over twenty years resulted in five published collections.

In 1947, as lyricist with Kurt Weill and Elmer Rice on the Broadway opera Street Scene, Hughes achieved a major critical success. After buying a house in Harlem, he lived there the rest of his life, although, as his book-length poem Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) revealed, he feared for the future of urban blacks. His output became prodigious and included another book of verse, almost a dozen children's books, several opera libretti, four books translated from French and Spanish, two collections of stories, another novel, a history of the naacp, and another volume of autobiography, I Wonder As I Wander (1956). He also continued his work in the theater, pioneering in the gospel musical play.

By the time of his death Hughes was widely recognized as the most representative of African-American writers and perhaps the most original of black poets. What set him apart was the deliberate saturation of his work in the primary expressive forms of black mass culture as well as in the typical life experiences of the mass of African-Americans, whom he viewed with near-total love and devotion. Despite his humane interest in other cultures and peoples, he saw blacks as his primary audience. As a result, his vast body of work, uneven in quality as it is, nevertheless rings with almost unrivaled authority and authenticity as an inspired portrait of black American culture and consciousness.

Bibliography:

Faith Berry, Langston Hughes: Before and beyond Harlem (1983); Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, 2 vols. (1986, 1988).

Author:

Arnold Rampersad

See also Harlem Renaissance; Literature.

(1902-1967)

1926	The Weary Blues. Hughes's first collection shows his distinctive focus on black experience, musically derived rhythms, and a rich use of vernacular language, qualities that will establish him as the leading poet of the Harlem Renaissance and one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century. Ironically, the volume and his second collection, Fine Clothes to the Jews (1927), would be attacked by black reviewers for what they considered his primitive, dialect style and emphasis on the unflattering aspects of African American life.
1927	Fine Clothes to the Jew. Hughes's second collection presents a realistic depiction of Harlem life and the problems faced by African Americans. It includes some of his most accomplished blues poems, including "Homesick Blues," "Listen Here Blues," and "Young Gal's Blues."
1930	Not Without Laughter. The first of Hughes's two novels concerns a black family in Kansas. The book is praised for Hughes's ability to capture the complexity and believable humanity of African American characters.
1931	"Christ in Alabama." Hughes's protest poem dealing with the trial of the Scottsboro Boys equates the silence of black colleges over the verdict to the bystanders at Christ's crucifixion. When Hughes reads the poem, with the lines "Christ is a Nigger / Beaten and black"--at the University of North Carolina, a near riot ensues.
1932	The Dream Keeper and Scottsboro Limited: Four Poems and a Play in Verse. The first is a selection of the poet's works for young people; the second is a series of poems and a one-act play on the Scottsboro case.
1932	Scottsboro Limited. First published in the New Masses and first performed at a mass rally to protest the Scottsboro verdict, Hughes's one-act protest play in verse uses a chorus as well as a bare stage with a single white man to represent the forces of oppression. It ends with black characters smashing an electric chair while the audience is encouraged to shout "Fight, fight, fight," and a red flag is symbolically raised. The play marks the beginning of Hughes's association with leftist politics.
1934	The Ways of White Folks. Hughes's first story collection deals with race relations from what at the time was considered a unique African American perspective.
1935	Mulatto. Hughes achieves his only substantial dramatic success in this play about the biracial children of a white Georgia plantation owner and his black housekeeper. The Broadway run of 375 performances is the longest to date for any play with a racial theme and a predominantly black cast.
1936	When the Jack Hollers. The writers collaborate on a "Negro folk drama," set in the Mississippi Delta and concerning black sharecroppers. Hughes also writes Little Ham, a celebration of everyday Harlem life that anticipates his Simple stories.
1940	The Big Sea. This autobiographical account of the writer's life up to the age of twenty-seven includes his trip on a freighter to Africa, struggles in Paris during the 1920s, college experience, and early successes as a poet.
1942	Shakespeare in Harlem and Other Poems. The poet describes this volume as "a book of light verse. Afro-Americana in the blues mood."
1942	Langston Hughes's "Here to Yonder" column debuts. Published in the Chicago Defender, Hughes's column will continue for twenty years. In it he introduced his most beloved creation, the common man from Harlem, Jesse B. Semple, later called Jesse B. Simple, whose comments on life and race would be collected in five volumes and form the basis for Hughes's musical play Simply Heavenly (1959).
1943	Freedom's Plow. Hughes's long "prose poem" concerns how blacks and whites jointly contributed to the building of America. Hughes also publishes a pamphlet of twenty-three poems, Jim Crow's Last Stand, a scathing attack on racial injustice.
1947	Fields of Wonder. Hughes publishes his only collection of lyrics on nonracial themes.
1949	Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1949. A groundbreaking anthology of poetry from African American and Caribbean writers.
1949	One-Way Ticket. The poet returns to black urban themes and features one of his most endearing creations, Alberta K. Johnson, in the poem "Madam to You."
1951	Montage of a Dream Deferred. Hughes incorporates musical rhythms into a series of vibrant images that depict modern urban black life. "Harlem"--with the line "What happens to a dream deferred?"--becomes one of Hughes's best-known and admired poems.
1952	Laughing to Keep from Crying. A collection of stories composed in the 1930s and 1940s, treating the conflicts experienced by African Americans. Hughes's final collection, Something in Common, would appear in 1963.
1956	I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey. In the second installment of Hughes's autobiographical recollections following The Big Sea (1940), the writer continues his account of his life up to 1938.
1958	Tambourines to Glory. Hughes's second novel treats the goings-on in a black storefront church in a comic morality play. Begun as a gospel musical, Hughes converted the story into fiction; he would restore it as a musical in 1963.
1961	Black Nativity. Hughes's celebration of the birth of Christ with gospel music, spirituals, dance, and drama proves to be his most successful musical play.
1961	Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz. Many consider this work Hughes's masterpiece, a fusion of poetry and jazz, history and myth. Inspired by the riot of white youths at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1960, the sequence is structured by the African American verbal insult game, the "dozen," and anticipates the escalation of confrontation and violence that would mark American racial history during the decade.
1962	Fight for Freedom: The Story of the NAACP. Hughes commemorates the accomplishments of the NAACP and its leaders over half a century, including a defense of contemporary activities in the South.
1967	The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times. Hughes's last collection is noteworthy for its rising tone of militancy, particularly in "Words on Fire."

Quotes:

"I swear to the Lord, I still can't see, why Democracy means, everybody but me."

"Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly."

"Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it."

"No woman can be handsome by the force of features alone, any more that she can be witty by only the help of speech."

"What happens to a dream deferred?Does it dry uplike a raisin in the sun?Or fester like a soreAnd then run?Does it stink like rotten meat?Or crust and sugar overlike a syrupy sweet?Maybe it just sagslike a heavy lead. Or does it explode?"

"Listen, Christ,You did alright in your day, I reckonBut that days gone now. They ghosted you up a swell story, too,Called it BibleBut its dead now. The popes and the preachersveMade too much money from it. Theyve sold you too manyKings, generals, robbers, and killersEven to the Czar and the Cossacks,Even to Rockefellers church,Even to THE SATURDAY EVENING POST. You aint no good no more. Theyve pawned youTill youve done wore out. Goodbye,Christ Jesus Lord God Jehova,Beat it on away from here now. Make way for a new guy with no religion at allA real guy namedMarx Communist Lenin Peasant Stalin Worker MEI said, ME!Go Ahead on now,Youre getting in the way of things, Lord. And please take Saint Ghandi [sic] with you when you go,And Saint Pope Pius,And Saint Aimee McPherson,And big black Saint BectonOf the Consecrated Dime. And step on the gas, Christ!Move!Dont be so slow about movin!The world is mine from now onAnd nobodys gonna sell METo a king, or a general,Or a millionaire."

See more famous quotes by Langston Hughes

• Born: February 01, 1902, Joplin, MO
• Died: May 22, 1967, New York, NY
• Active: '20s, '30s, '40s, '50s, '60s
• Genres: Spoken Word
• Instrument: Liner Notes
• Representative Albums: "The Voice of Langston Hughes
• Representative Songs: "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", "I, Too", "Mulatto

Biography

The recording career of this great American writer includes not only his own spoken word collections for Smithsonian-Folkways but many instances where his texts are utilized by other artists, sometimes in direct collaboration with Hughes and at other times after the fact. While heavily associated with black jazz and blues, the writings of Hughes have not shown up exclusively in these genres. Rather, if there is a similarity in the type of performers willing to pull a Hughes tome off the shelf, it would be those expressing discontent with the racial and political status quo. The beatnik scene of the '50s and '60s was a typical topical time for Hughes, yet again the appearance of his writings as part of recording projects is hardly limited to these years.

During the '70s, the Gary Bartz NTU Troop -- a modern jazz combo that hardly hesitated to take on political topics -- recorded a beautiful live version of "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," Hughes' first published poem, presenting the version with music under the name of "I've Known Rivers." Portly singer Big Miller tracked 11 blues written specifically for him by Hughes on a late-'50s album, Did You Ever Hear the Blues? The German Caspar Brötzmann used texts by Hughes on a 1993 recording, sonically a great contrast to better-known adaptations by performers such as Joan Baez and Harry Belafonte.

Hughes began writing poetry in the eighth grade and, despite the acceptance of his efforts from classmates and teachers, was pushed in the direction of an engineering degree by his parents. Hughes did well in the latter studies at Columbia University, nonetheless dropping out to follow the writing muse. He would eventually publish 16 books of poems, two novels, three collections of short stories, four volumes of essays, 20 plays, a collection of children's poetry, several musicals and operas, three autobiographies, plus many radio and television scripts and magazine articles. His house at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem was given landmark status by the New York City Preservation Commission following his death from cancer in the '60s. The block itself is now called Langston Hughes Place. ~ Eugene Chadbourne, All Music Guide

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